


like the wind on the mountain

by serenfire



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Challenge: femslashsw, Coming to Terms with Adoption, Episode IV Canon Divergence, F/F, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Just gals being pals, Military Training, Politics, Rogue One Speculation, Spaceships, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-08-30 09:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8528161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: Leia meets Evaan when she is sixteen.A story of the Rebellion on Alderaan.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hint2bee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hint2bee/gifts).



> Thank you @glaciallesbian for the very free prompt suggestion, and I hope that my worldbuilding and reconfiguration of canon is to your liking. Thanks also to the mods at @femslashsw for hosting this wonderful challenge. I'm only one week late, so, I hope the content makes up for it.

_Love shook my heart,_

_Like the wind on the mountain_

_Troubling the oak-trees._

-Sappho

* * *

 

“Tell me about the Galactic Senate,” Leia asks her mother, eyes wide.

Breha, ever the magnanimous ruler, checks the hour in the sundial and purses her lips. She leans against the soft cushions in the lounge, and from the other side of the room, Leia’s nanny smiles at both of them, together painting the perfect picture of Alderaanian royalty.

“Can you reschedule your lessons with Leia?” Breha asks the nanny.

She inclines her head. “If you can reschedule your next meeting with the Coruscant delegation, I can delay Basic lessons. Spend time with your daughter, my Queen.”

“Please,” Breha says, even as Leia squeals with joy and climbs into her mother’s lap. “Call me Breha.”

“As you wish, Queen Breha,” the nanny says and exits the lounge. She remembers them as the princess, ruddy-faced and barely seven, and her mother, the essence of practiced grace emanating from her.

Breha Organa turns to Leia, tangling her hands in her daughter’s hair. “I see you’ve uncurled your locks again.”

Leia touches her mother’s perfectly coiffed hair. “I was sword fighting,” she explains. “I can’t look like a princess when I’m fighting.”

“Oh?” her mother asks. “And what must you look like?”

Leia grins, imagining the glint of steel in her hand, the rush of adrenaline flooding her young veins when she whacks her tutor across the knuckles with the stick she practices with--but in her mind, she’s older and wiser, as strong as her mother’s bodyguards and twice as famous. She’s not a princess any longer, she’s--”A pirate,” she says. “A space pirate.”

Breha nods. “I understand now,” she says. “My own daughter, heir to the House of Organa, a space pirate. But I thought you were interested in the Senate.”

Leia pouts. “Not the current Senate, mom. Dad always comes home from work complaining about--about, um, system something against the Outer Rim?”

“Systemic violence against the people of the Outer Rim?” her mother suggests, still brushing her fingers through Leia’s hair. The light is flowing freely from the lounge, the natural light reflecting off the snow-capped mountains, refracts off her eyes, not reaching into her being. “Don’t pay attention to anything your father says. He’s happy for the job.”

“But he preferred the old Senate,” Leia finished for her. She’s seven and the world is unexplored and at her fingertips, she’s a princess and she doesn’t know what that means, she’s going to be a space pirate Senator and follow every word of queenly advice her mother gives her, and she’s going to steal her dad’s service R4 unit to pilot her pirate ship. She’s a princess, after all, and princesses always get someone else to pilot them.

“You’re right,” Breha Organa nods. “The Galactic Senate was the best institution created in the Republic, and though it wasn’t perfect, it was our pride and joy. The Imperial Senate is--well, do you know how your old nanny taught you how to give puppet shows?”

“Yeah,” Leia smiles, lost in memory like only a carefree child. “She fed me the leftovers from your important parties, too. Before she left.”

“Right,” Breha agrees, even though she didn’t know the sneaking food part. She knew the secret informant of the Mon Calamari empire part, though. “The Senators make decisions, but we are the puppets in the show, and the Emperor is the real person who decides things.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Leia says. “Dad tried to be Chancellor once, and he wasn’t voted in, and he told me that we should always respect authority, because we wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“It’s different,” Breha says. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” She casts a look at the sundial again. “I have to go meet my delegation.”

“Are you going to try and get the Galactic Senate back?” Leia blurts out, chewing on a fingernail.

Breha looks at the empty doorway where the nanny had stood just minutes ago. “No,” she says. “What I said about authority stands true, whether or not I agree with them.”

“Hmm,” frowns Leia. “Does that mean I can’t be a space pirate?”

Breha turns to her. In the long light cast by the waning shadows of the day, her wrinkles are pronounced, and she stands, a regal figure, aged and strong. “Be whatever you want,” Breha says. “But always remember, you are a member of the House of Organa. Wherever you go, whatever you do, this will never change.”

*

Leia bursts awake, drawing deep shaking breaths from within her shaking body. Precious seconds pass as she struggles to contain herself, and as soon as she can quiet her bleating heart, she scrambles up in her cot to see if she’s awoken anyone else.

The entire room is quiet. The sea of female bodies are all asleep, something that hasn’t happened in the week Leia has been at basic training. At any point in the night, at least one fifteen- or sixteen-year-old is crying for home, reciting traditional chants under their breath--Leia is glad she wasn’t the only one taught absolution to lull herself back to sleep--or fucking. It’s really the last one that happens all the time, because some people (less cultured than herself, of course) decide that as this is the first time they’ve been away from home, and they’re all almost adults, they can do whatever they want.

Leia, unlike some people, came here to do her civic duty. She hasn’t met a single other person who wasn’t here because of a disciplinary infraction, boredom, or for good marks to be put on their record so when they ultimately “transfer out of this system, we’ll be prepared.” Prepared for what, she asked. For “the quality of life outside of Alderaan, where every humanoid is for themselves, and we need all the weapon training we can get.”

Leia closes her eyes, and in the harsh afterimages, she can still see the memory from when she was a child, clear as the full moon outside the barracks window--her mother’s smile, her naivete, the careful way her mother talked about the Empire, even then, before the rumors started.

Whatever. Leia came here to forget the rumors, and forget the connection she has with the Royal House of Alderaan. She even buzzed her hair shorter than regulation length, and laughed in her father’s face when he stared at her locks lying on the floor.

“I’m going to the army,” she tells him, her bag slung over her shoulder. A D7 unit waits outside the side door in a nondescript speeder for her arrival. “I’m sick and tired of being trained to be a diplomatic princess. I want to be able to lead, and nothing you’re teaching me in this mountain palace is useful. I’m going to get some life experience.”

“But your hair,” her father says, looking at the hair littering the floor, making a trail from the bathroom. “Your heritage.”

“When I return--if I return--use some emergency hair grower before I’m fit to be in the public eye again.”

“You’re still an Organa, whether or not you bear the physical traits of one,” her father calls out to her as she tromps to the speeder, hoisting her bag over the side. “Is this about you being adopted?”

“No,” Leia sneers. Yes. “This is about not being a sheltered kid any more! I’m of age for the army, Senator. If I want to join to patriotically serve my planet, you can’t do anything about it.”

“Did you tell your mother?”

The D4 unit turns the speeder on. The hunk of rust makes a loud grunt and shudders to life.

Leia turns to her father. “I thought, since you were the one who decided to adopt me, you would be the one to tell her this, too.”

She signals to the droid to take her away.

Now, only seven days later, she is homesick. She misses her parents, however fake they may be, and she misses the mountain palace. But, Leia admits, she would do it all over again for the feeling of being one of many, of being a member of a group. Half her peers sleeping in this very room have also buzzed their hair to their scalps, even though it is not required. Everyone goes by their last name, and Leia opted for a fake surname picked from a list of common ones.

No one knows who she is, and it’s exactly how Leia wants it. She’s of average height, standing next to those dressed in the same fatigues as her, running tracks and lifting weights in sync with a hundred other teenagers in her squadron.

But remembering the look on her mother’s face as she was a child, remembering how her mother was close with her and didn’t hesitate to tell her everything--that is worse than bearing the rumors about how the House of Organa are all traitors. Remembering a time when her family wasn’t straining at the seams and held together by the glue of politics is almost unbearable.

Leia fades back into sleep, still thinking about the memory.

*

The cadets are awakened at oh six hundred hours by the routine siren, and Leia stumbles out of bed with the rest of them, her family the last thing on her mind. First, she needs food, and then to not ache in her bones as they run miles in the searing summer morning.

Echoes of her family don’t bother her.

The mess hall is where she meets Evaan Verlaine for the first time. When Leia walks through the front door, she is greeted by a body slamming into hers, and hits the wall, the air knocked out of her lungs.

The body scrambles up and looks at her, genuine fear in her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she says, and as she extends a hand to pick Leia up, their eyes meet. “I--I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry--”

Leia feels something from that grip, the hand pressed around hers, a shock wave travelling up her arm. It is exactly the crawling feeling she felt when she woke up. She slowly shakes the fellow cadet’s hand.

Leia notices only her striking eyes before the cadet is hauled away by one she’s never seen before, one with a tattoo on his neck and palms curled into fists.

“Let’s finish this, royalist,” he sneers at her.

Leia herself flinches before she realizes the insult isn’t directed at her, because no one knows who she is, but is directed at this cadet, her blonde hair exactly regulation length and the color of her jumpsuit a pilot’s orange.

The cadet snarls in return, balling her fist and saying, “You’re one to talk. I assume you’re one of the juvie transfers. What a prominent Humanoid gang tattoo.”

“You won’t last a second with any real Alderaanians,” the tatted humanoid supremacist says, and a crowd is gathering around them as he bares his gold plated teeth and moves to punch her.

Leia is faster. She grew up trained by the best martial art instructors on the planet, and her skill is exceptional, her form flawless. She moves in between the rivals, almost as if another force pushes her, her back to the pilot in training, squaring herself against the blow that comes.

She hears her nose crack and feels a sharp pain in her forehead. The humanoid supremacist is reeling back, though, and her anger gives her enough power to quickly retaliate, kicking the humanoid in his very predictable balls and offering a sharp elbow to the head.

The cadet behind her doesn’t stay behind her and in her protection, but moves in front of Leia as the humanoid gasps for air and struggles to get up, swiping a hand at the cadet.

Leia kicks him again in the ribs, growling, “You don’t speak for Alderaan. Your hate doesn’t speak for anyone but yourself.”

Next to her, the cadet holds a hand to her stomach, and pulls it away, openmouthed, to reveal the red stain of blood. Leia looks at the hand and then to her face, not understanding how one punch could puncture skin like that, as the cadet says, “Metal knuckles,” before falling into the arms of the cadets around them.

Leia touches her nose, equally broken, and agrees with her, before she feels herself fading into the arms of the onlookers.

She wakes up in a white windowless room, her head full of starchy cotton and her eyes refusing to fully open. For a second, the room looks like the spacious lounge of her childhood, where yawning walls melded into an open-air balcony and she would spend hours as a child staring off into the mountains, looking at the scenery her parents told her was the pride and joy of Alderaan, wondering why she dreamed of hot muggy sand and twin suns staring her weary body down when all she had ever known was calming peaks.

Leia blinks out of the memory, the fuzz rising in her throat. She felt this way after she woke up screaming from a dream that was not a memory and yet was, somehow, inexplicably. But she remembers nothing from sleep. Leia blearily looks down at her arm, where an IV fills her body with fluids and sedatives. She closes her eyes, pulling deep within her still-young self, searching the cavern of a mind for the missing memory. Maybe this memory is the key to the jerkiness in her body.

“Is the pain still there?” a voice comes from the side of the room she has yet ignored. Leia jerks her head and stares at the woman, the same cadet she had defended before passing out, who is in a bed identical to hers, wearing only standard issue undergarments and with a large bandage wrapped around her waist, stained with blood. In this light, the cadet’s hair is less blond and her presence does not have the same same shocking effect as before.

“No,” Leia says. “Just--I don’t remember.”

“The drugs will do that to you,” the cadet agrees. “Apparently the military doesn’t want possible insurgents remembering what caused them to lash out.”

“What?” frowns Leia.

“I know.” The cadet sticks out her hand, an IV line tracing from it. Leia carefully shakes it. “Evaan Verlaine, former cadet for the pilot program.”

“Former?” Leia frowns.

“That’s right.” Verlaine’s smile is equal amounts wide and fake. “We’ve been kicked out of the army, effective immediately.”

“Why?”

“We attacked a member of the corps, someone who was ordered to be there by the court, so obviously he wouldn’t intentionally get himself kicked out. Therefore, the military tribunal decided it was our fault.”

“That’s not legal,” Leia says, and the machine next to her starts to beep, presumably matching her heart rate. Ancient machine, aggravating her further.

“I know,” Verlaine warns, and holds out a hand to stop Leia from scrambling up. “Believe me, Princess, I know.”

Leia freezes, her blood ice in her veins. Verlaine knows. The buzzing in her head increases for a second until it snaps, and she hears Verlaine say, “You’re not what I expected.” Her lips don’t move.

“Excuse me?”

Verlaine glances at the camera in the corner of the room, and leans her face away from it. “I know who you are,” she whispers. “I’m a royalist. I believe in the right to rule of the House of Organa.”

But I’m not an Organa, Leia wants to say. But, ever the good Princess, she holds her tongue.

“Don’t worry,” Verlaine assures her. “No one else suspects. I’m the only royalist here. We’re surrounded by a bunch of--democrats and imperialists and the sort.”

“We are all democrats and imperialists, too,” Leia reminds her, heart still pounding in line with the infernal machine sticking a needle into her skin instead of letting her nose soak in bacta, or something modern and helpful. “Alderaan is part of alliances bigger than herself. And how have we been expelled? Infighting isn’t illegal, not if I can defend myself against that humanist bigot.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” Verlaine says, and at this she clenches her jaw and holds a hand to her stomach. “I tried to explain my side fully, ma’am, and they were not happy.”

“Don’t call me ma’am,” Leia says. She’s the same age as this former cadet, and she shouldn’t be ma’am, not anymore, not since she’s adopted. “I’m not Queen yet.”

“Of course, Princess,” Verlaine says. “I know this is all my fault. Is there anything I can do for you? Do you want me to summon a droid so you can holo a driver for your return?”

Leia bites her lip. She’s still adopted. She can’t go back and admit defeat because she did something, well, queenly, and the people didn’t like it.

At least Verlaine is a royalist, she supposes. Silver lining.

“How are you getting back to your home?” Leia says.

“I--I have a speeder,” Verlaine says, nodding like no one’s taught her how to lie convincingly, like she isn’t stock-thin from chronic malnutrition and as penniless as she smells.

Leia changes her mind on the spot.

“Actually,” she says, “I brought a few hundred credits with me to basic, and now I have a reason to spend them that’s not extra rations and toothpaste. Since I’m not a cadet any longer, I am going to enjoy this short hair and relative anonymity while it lasts in the Culture Sector. Want to join me?”

The last question is a wild guess, something Leia says because despite her extensive training in the areas of manners and proper etiquette, she blurts words out that she doesn’t intend and wouldn’t take them back for the world. This is a response to the tension in her gut, the surge in her heart when Verlaine was pulled back into a brawl by a bigot who got away free.

Verlaine cracks a smile for one second before she pulls it back into a serene face. “I would love to accompany you, Princess,” she says. “Truthfully, I don’t have a speeder. I don’t have any family that would pick me up, and my last foster parent dropped me off here with no money. I was going to walk back to the spaceport and book the first flight out of here.”

“I’m glad we understand ourselves then, Verlaine,” Leia says, taking the IV line out of her skin.

Verlaine jerks a nod. “Your clothes are in the box in the corner, Princess. I’ll just--go to the bathroom.” She moves out of her bed with surprising speed and removes the IV in such a way suggesting this is not the first time she’s escaped from a hospital.

Leia watches her go and takes careful steps to the box of the clothes she arrived in sitting in the corner. As she puts them on, she doesn’t see a reflective surface to check her face, but as she gingerly touches her nose, she feels stuffy bandages extending almost to her eyes and mouth, and underneath is numbness.

Now, she assumes, she looks nothing like a princess.

*

Verlaine seems to have fashioned herself as Leia’s official guard, and even though she is not in a pilot’s orange, she sits ramrod still in the speeder next to her as they glide into town.

“Don’t worry, I’ll drop you off at the spaceport when I’m done and pay for a ticket wherever you want to go,” Leia assures her. “You’re not my official bodyguard.”

“I assumed that from the fact that you’re travelling as a normal citizen, Princess.”

Leia raises an eyebrow. Verlaine sits next to her in the civilian vehicle, the clothing she wears draping off her bones. “You’re going to need to stop calling me Princess, you know.”

Verlaine nods. “Yes, Pr--yes, I understand.” She looks at the unconcerned droid driving the speeder.

“Don’t worry,” Leia assures her. “Driver droids’ memories are wiped routinely. And besides, the tabloids could care less about the Princess mingling with her future subjects.”

Verlaine says, “Actually, the tabloids care about you a lot.”

Of course the royalist would be one to read every bit of gossip she could get on the royal family. Leia had, from birth, been outlawed from reading anything related to her family that wasn’t from official Coruscant or Imperial holo news. It wouldn’t hurt to see what her parents have been doing in her absence.

“What have they been saying?” Leia asks.

Verlaine’s back straightens even more, if that is possible. “Some of the more popular ones have been hinting that there’s a secret reason you left the palace.”

“They know I left?” Leia ignores the pang in her gut. The tabloids couldn’t know why.

“Of course,” Verlaine says. “The Queen issued a press statement the day before you arrived here, saying that you would be doing your civic duty to the country for an indeterminate amount of time. That’s why I noticed you when you arrived.”

“And you’re sure no one else did?”

Verlaine frowns, and even her frown is militaristic in its conciseness. “No one else in our regiment is nearly as subtle as me.”

“Okay,” Leia says. Guilt bites her gut again at the news. Her mother has written her antics off as something to not be worried about, and has given it freely to the press. She knows there are certain things the House of Organa keeps secret, like the routine deposition of Imperial spies always crawling into their ranks, and the meetings late at night that her father arrives home from, eyes ringed with worry, that Leia’s quite sure is a plot to make Alderaan Separatist--and, of course, the secret that the Organa heir is adopted.

Not the secret that the Organa heir has run away, though. That secret is up for grabs by any tabloid press that catches the news and spins it into fluff.

“Princess,” Verlaine is saying, and Leia shakes herself out of the reverie.

“Yes?”

“So you don’t read the tabloid press?”

“Why would I?” Leia shrugs. “It’s all false if it’s about anything important.”

“So it’s not true about you, then?” Verlaine asks. “You didn’t join the army because of a secret reason?”

Leia looks at the road in front of them. The nearest town and the cluster of life within it is almost within reach. “You talk back quite a lot for a royalist,” she says.

Verlaine clenches her teeth. “Not my intention,” she states.

“No, out with it.” Leia is tired of everyone keeping secrets from her. “Please, tell me what you really think.”

Verlaine seems to think about that. “I would rather not.”

“I would really like to know what my future subjects think of me. I’m not--I’m not ordering you, or anything, I would just. Like to know.”

The speeder drives in silence for a few miles more, and the anti grav engine sputters at least five times in that distance, shaking both inhabitants as the silence grows to an unbearable extent.

Leia reminds herself, Verlaine is only here because she has nowhere else to go--and on top of that, she follows an idealized version of the Organa family.

Verlaine nods, finally. “It’s just that if the tabloids are right, and you’re not disputing that, you didn’t join the army because you’re following in the footsteps of your mother and trying to be a better leader. You’re running away from something. And if the monarchy works, it’s because the monarch does everything to better their people, not because it’s convenient. Princess.”

“Look,” Leia says, and she’s not sure why her tongue is loosened like this, or why she is about to tell everything to a virtual stranger. “I’m not an Organa. I’m adopted. And it wasn’t legal or well-documented, either. I don’t know who my birth parents are, and I don’t know where I hail from. I know I’m not Alderaanian by birth. And I just--I don’t deserve to be the Princess. Please don’t tell the tabloids.”

Verlaine is silent. The first buildings of the town roll by the speeder. It’s almost noon, and Alderaan’s one pale sun shines down on the few inhabitants not indoors and working. By the time the droid parks the speeder at the downtown motel, she has formulated her response.

“You don’t choose to be a princess, Princess. Someone else does the choosing for you. But you’re the one who chooses what to do with that honor. Ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am,” Leia says. “Remember, we need to blend in. You’re not my bodyguard.”

“Right,” Verlaine says, as if she’s physically swallowing her own tongue. “Leia.”

“Right,” Leia says, a large and fake smile plastered on her face, the one she usually reserves for press conferences, “Evaan.”

*

They go to see a cloister performance, to hear the live holo records of the best musicians this side of the Core play to their hearts’ content, almost unaware of the hundreds of people congregated around their images in rustic bars, sound compressed and belted out tinny speakers rattling with old age, the connection fuzzy and blue lines streaking through the performance.

Leia and Evaan Verlaine sit in the back of one of these bars near the heart of the town. Leia attentively nods her head to the beat kept by the tambourine, the ratta-ratta just within hearing range of the muffled recording. Along with combat training and diplomacy politics, her parents hired tutors for music training. “Any good Alderaanian is a lover of music,” Bail Organa told her after the seven-year-old had refused to practice the harpsichord, claiming her hands hurt. “But if you want to succeed in the eyes of the citizens, you must be a player of music, too.”

The next day, Bail replaced Leia’s harpsichord teacher with a fresh face carrying several differently-sized string instruments, who claimed she was an expert in all of them, and asked the young princess to try and play each and every one of them.

Leia blinks and looks at the Alderaanian cluster playing a riffed-up version of a Jedi hymn, the tambourine shaking out steady offbeats. Even though she had just taken a drink of the alcoholic beverage the bartender was more than happy to give to soldiers dutifully serving their planet, her tongue is dry and heavy in her mouth.

She looks at Evaan, who hasn’t seemed to notice yet. Unlike her, Evaan Verlaine isn’t enjoying the cluster’s sounds, and isn’t nursing her drink. She sits as if she was still in active service, regulation-length hair curling around her ears and glancing around the dimly lit atmosphere.

“Do you know what they’re singing?” Leia asks, to make conversation if nothing else. She saved Evaan from massive injury, and Evaan agreed to accompany her, but she doesn’t seem to be enjoying it, and Leia doesn’t know why. Almost despite herself, Leia wants Evaan to enjoy this time.

Evaan starts, knuckles white around her full beer glass. “I’m afraid not, ma’am--Leia. I’m not extremely cultured.”

“It’s from the Old Republic,” Leia whispers to her, leaning in close so no other patron would overhear. “It’s from the Jedi Temple.”

Evaan stares at her, and then back at the cluster, whose variations on the theme are distorting the original melody. “Oh,” she says quietly.

Leia takes a look around the bar. Most of the patrons are middle-aged construction workers and businesspeople, sitting in harmony with empty glasses littering their tables. None of them notice the illegal music being played.

“They should be more careful,” Leia comments. “If the wrong person were to hear…” She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Evaan has lived her entire life with the Empire a shadow behind her shoulder as well.

“They should be able to do it,” Evaan says firmly.

This is the first time she’s spoken with confidence, without acknowledging the class difference a yawning ditch between them. Groomed for power since birth, Leia finds herself wanting to hear Evaan continue to speak to her like an equal.

“Go on,” she says.

Evaan stretches back into a staunch position, as if waiting for orders. “My mistake,” she says, looking at the cluster performing to avoid looking at Leia.

“No, please. Tell me why they should break Imperial rules.”

Evaan must believe in this more than she believes in the superiority of the monarchy, because she continues. “Rebellion is the only way to restore Alderaan to her former glory, and to save her besides. Everyone must play a part, and if you’re supposed to make music to support the Empire, make music to tear them down instead.”

Leia nods even as her gut grows cold. “You support the Rebel Alliance,” she says, the words tricky on her tongue. She’s never spoken them aloud before, knowing that uttering the name is as good as signing up for the cause.

“I do,” Evaan says. “I was recruited as soon as I entered the military. And now, well, I don’t have to wait to complete a tour. I was planning to go to their homeworld.”

“You know where their homeworld is?” Leia says, louder than she would have liked. None of the drunk patrons even glance at her.

“Of course I do,” Evaan says, and the cloister finishes the song with a long chord on the cello. “You know that by telling you this I’m implicating you as a rebel.”

“I don’t know where their homeworld is,” Leia shrugs. “Their truth serum won’t be able to get it out of me. All I know is that I met a Rebel who was the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, and she somehow respected my heritage and plotted against the Empire in the same breath. She was the most Alderaanian person I’ve ever met.”

Evaan meets her eyes this time, and Leia can stare into the blue eyes she’s sure are a mutation derived of a non-humanoid ancestor, farther back than Imperial gene testing can measure. Neither of them are drunk, but both of them have admitted things they didn’t plan on, and not even Leia knows where to go from here.

Evaan reaches out and brushes Leia’s buzzed hair like a benediction. “Thank you, Princess,” she says. “That’s the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“Join the Rebel Alliance,” Leia whispers, “and I’m sure they’ll say kinder. I’m sure you’ll become their poster girl for recruitment within the month.”

“I didn’t know you supported the Rebellion, Princess,” Evaan says, and her voice borders on teasing. Leia didn’t even know Evaan could be sultry and sarcastic in the same breath.

“I don’t,” Leia says. “But I support you.” She takes Evaan’s hand, and a warm wave radiates up her arm. It’s not the surprise shock she felt before, but the product of extreme fondness and want.

Looking at Evaan’s pupils, large and flicking from Leia’s eyes to her lips, she wants this too.

“Do you want to get out of here?” Leia asks.

“Yes,” Evaan answers immediately. “I--would like that very much.”

*

The motel room is muggy, even in the autumn breeze, and the one window is fully open, allowing the paltry wind to brush their faces. Evaan and Leia now lie listless on the bed, and Leia stares up at the ceiling with a water stain, mind absolutely nowhere.

In her mind, she sees a dust-covered speeder racing through sand dunes, her hair--which she doesn’t have any more--whipping around in the breeze. Scratchy wool encases her body, and setting to the left is one sun, the other still hot in the sky.

She sits up, the linen covers of the bed rough under her shaking fingers.

Evaan lifts an eyebrow to look at her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Just daydreaming after a night well-spent. She’s had more vivid hallucinations before.

“I mean, if you regretted anything that happened, Princess--” Evaan starts.

“Stop,” Leia says wearily, and Evaan immediately shuts her mouth. The words die in Leia’s mouth as she realizes Evaan is still obeying her every wish. “I mean, don’t stop on account of me. Ever. Do what you will. But no, I don’t regret a single thing. Do you?”

“Of course not,” Evaan says in a rush, and when Leia cranes her neck to look at her, the other girl is blushing, even in the midnight dark. “I wasn’t the one freaking out.”

“Neither was I.”

“Is it something else?” Evaan asks. “Where do you want to go next to experience life as a normal Alderaanian?”

Leia is quiet. She doesn’t know. Here, after midnight, as the holo clock blinks bold numbers at her, she doesn’t know what to do. She has gained Evaan’s trust and something better besides, and forgot, when naked, about Evaan’s plan to join the Rebellion and get herself killed fighting a useless fight against the Empire, but now...now she’s pondering it. How can someone throw their life away in dedication to a failed cause, and do it with such rigour as Evaan?

The Empire has never done anything against Alderaan, unlike their hostile takeover of Coruscant. Alderaan is safe and uninvolved, and it is Leia’s duty as the Princess of the House of Organa, whether she accepts it or not, to keep Alderaan that way. She can’t be here, spending time with a soon-to-be fugitive, getting corrupted by rebellious ideas.

And yet Leia stays. She lies next to Evaan and listens to her breath and the beat of her heart, and looks at her inhuman eyes, proof that her life is the living testament to rebellion against the reproduction codes. She lies next to a traitor to the Empire and to Alderaan, and she enjoys it.

Leia blames her biological parents for the fault in judgement. A true Organa would never think to interact with a traitor, let alone deign to sleep with one. Unsurprisingly, Leia does not care.

Leia smiles, and touches her hair again, feeling almost like animal fur on her scalp, soft and natural.

“Leia,” Evaan says, voice urgent, and Leia focuses her attention on Evaan, who is turning on the holo radio.

“Don’t play the tabloids, please,” Leia begs. “I don’t want to hear what they know about me for at least another day.”

“It’s not that,” Evaan says, too stressed and high-strung for someone whose clothes are still strewn across the room. “It’s an official broadcast from Coruscant.”

Leia yawns and looks to where Evaan has flipped channels to the only one playing. The motel’s holo quality is even more abysmal than the bar, and the transmission is about three inches tall and completely blue, warbling in and out of existence.

Leia still knows who it is: Grand Moff Tarkin of the Imperial army. She’s learned about his prowess in war and the many Jedi he killed from her politics tutor obsessed with him.

“Citizens of Alderaan,” he says, and cracks a professional and terrible smile. “I am the bearer of good news for your planet from the Imperial Senate.”

Bail Organa had given Leia the details of the meetings of the Imperial Senate, and she knows they don’t meet for another two months, unless there was an emergency session called. And if there was an emergency session…

“As of an hour ago, a new representative for your planet was chosen by majority vote, and it is none other than your own Princess, Leia Organa. May you celebrate the representation.”

The transmission ends, and Leia is staring at a blank motel wall, also covered in a water stain, her stomach numb inside her. They spoke her name on the international broadcast. She was elected to the Senate, she was--

“Princess,” Evaan says, hastily putting on her clothes and tossing Leia’s at her, “we must leave, now.”

“What?” Leia frowns.

“If the Empire elected you to fill a seat that wasn’t vacant as of yesterday, that means they’re concerned with the rumors that you applied for military service, which means they think you were recruited by the Rebellion. This is their way of pulling you back into the spotlight and keeping an eye on you. You need to return to the palace, now.”

Leia nods, though her heart is empty and her brain isn’t working. It makes sense. She pulls her clothes on and runs her fingers through her shorn hair. “I have to go back,” she realizes.

Evaan turns to her. “You do,” she says, more softly, as if she just realized she’s talking to a person whose world has just been turned upside down. “We’ll stop by a pharmacy and get some hair growth on the way there.”

She leads Leia out and flags a speeder waiting at the front of the motel. “Nearest pharmacy, and then the Royal Palace,” Evaan instructs, handing over the last of Leia’s credits to the droid.

Leia realizes what’s going on after Evaan returns from the pharmacy and begins to rub in the ointment into her hair. Having never used hair growth before, Leia winces at the itchiness on her scalp as her hair replicates itself, and her scalp is heavy as dark brown hair curls around her shoulder.

Evaan takes a good look at her. “You still don’t look like a Princess,” she informs her.

“It’s the buns that make me look regal,” Leia says, and her fingers move on autopilot to braid her hair and wind it around her ear. “What about now?”

Evaan smiles. “Glad to have you back, Princess.”

“Not glad to be back,” Leia admits to her, whispering it as the speeder winds into the mountains and starts the hours-long path back to her family home.

“Your citizens need you,” Evaan says. “Be glad for them.”

*

The palace sits nestled in the snow caps, and as the speeder glides into the lawn, passing security personnel who whisper on comms that the princess is back, Leia feels the soft trickle of snow on her newly grown hair. She yawns, and beside her, Evaan stirs from sleep.

Leia hasn’t slept on the drive, as she looked through the pine forests and the fluttering wildlife, soaking in the beauty that is Alderaan. Evaan will become a good tactician someday, and will be an asset to the Rebel Alliance or the Alderaan military, but Evaan doesn’t know the Empire like Leia does.

If she goes to the Alliance’s homeworld outside the Core Worlds, she will soon know a lot more about the Empire, but for now, Evaan is an optimistic Alderaan recruit, and Leia has listened to Bail Organa detailing the Imperial Plaza and the infrequent trips to the man-made planet-size battle station. If Leia has been chosen for the Imperial Senate because they assume she ran away to the Alliance, her role in democracy will be no more than a place to be constantly monitored and questioned about her role in the rebellion.

Leia will never see Alderaan again.

So she fights off the enclave of sleep and stares at every corner of her dominion she will never rule, and prepares for the confines of a sleek black ship and a courtroom surrounded by stormtroopers for the rest of her life.

The speeder approaches the palace, and she can see the security guards nod at her, and can almost recognize them with the tears welling in her eyes.

One of her mother’s chauffeurs offers an arm to Leia to help her out of the speeder. When Leia hops out, the chauffeur says, “Your parents don’t know you’re here. They’re in a meeting.”

A ball of anger flashes hot in her gut. How are her parents in a meeting when, hours ago, Leia was selected to replace Jefferds in the Galactic Senate?

She helps Evaan out of the speeder, and the chauffeur is primly gawking at the casually dressed civilian whom the princess herself is helping.

Evaan whispers, “I don’t want to intrude on your parents. I’ll just wait out here.”

“Don’t you even think of doing that,” Leia says. “You’re--very important to me, and I need them to know that, too. It would also help to have a character reference to what I was doing for the past month.”

Evaan snorts at that, and out of the corner of Leia’s eyes she sees the chauffeur’s eyes boggle.

Leia clasps her hand and says, “Look, Evaan, I really need you here. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours.”

Evaan nods, and grip’s Leia’s hand tighter. “I’ll be here,” she promises. “Just go in and face what comes.”

So they walk inside together, and Leia holds her head high as the arching front doors open for them. Her parents take meetings in her mother’s office, and she guides Evaan through the hallways, garish paintings and bouquets of flowers dotting the corridors.

Evaan doesn’t seem daunted by the wealth displayed.

Leia hears soft murmured voices from her mother’s study, and pushes the wood panelled door open, ready to get straight down to business.

In her study, her mother freezes in the middle of the sentence, raising an eyebrow at Leia. Her father stands and tries to obscure the third person in the room, but Leia has already seen Mon Mothma, the Chandrilan delegate, sitting between them.

“Leia,” Bail Organa greets her, pulling her in for a hug. Leia relaxes into the touch, her father’s arms wrapped around her. She can’t believe that only a few weeks ago she had rejected him, when now he was the only one who could save her.

Then she pulls out of the embrace. She’s not a legal adult yet, but she is prepared to become the wisest and shrewdest diplomat the galaxy has seen. “Father,” she inclines her head, “why are you meeting with someone from Chandrila when all communication from that planet was outlawed three years ago?”

Behind her, Evaan bows in Chandrilan style at Mon Mothma, who in return greets, “Welcome, Cadet Verlaine.”

Leia turns to Evaan. “You know Mon Mothma?”

“She recruited me,” Evaan offers. Then she turns and nods in Alderaan style at Breha Organa. “My Queen, salut.”

“Evaan,” Breha Organa grins, “salut.”

Leia blinks again. “You know my mother?”

Breha says, “I tutored Evaan Verlaine in grade school, as part of the teaching initiative. Both of you, please sit. Leia, I’m glad you came back.”

“I, too, am glad,” Leia says, and relief settles on her as she echoes those words. “More than you can ever know.”

Breha smiles, tight with worry. “I think I may have an idea. Now, there is something you didn’t know about this family, Leia, and that is that we, along with Mon Mothma, are the primary patrons of the Rebel Alliance.”

Leia glances at Evaan, who is purposefully not looking at her. “Did you know this?” she asks.

“Unimportant,” Mon Mothma interrupts. As always, she presents the queenly grace that Breha sometimes lacks in favor of cunning and wit, and her smile calls everyone to settle and pay attention. “We now have to devise a way to make sure Leia retains all privileges of royalty in the Senate, and has a chance to smuggle information to the Alliance.”

“Which is located where, exactly?” Leia asks.

“Yavin 4,” Evaan whispers into her ear.

Leia frowns. “The largest threat the Empire has seen in twenty years is based in a jungle?”

Ignoring the outburst, Mon Mothma continues. “Bail, please explain how the Empire treats puppet delegates.”

“The Galactic Senate is a facade,” Bail tells Leia, more truthful about his work than he has ever been. “The only way to ensure any proposed solutions actually happen is to bring as much press as possible to it. The only way to ensure you aren’t virtually a prisoner of war, kept at Coruscant, is to bring as much press as possible to every event you’re in. Use your Senate coronation as a vehicle to make constant press conferences, to bring all of Alderaan in on the decisions being made.”

Leia nods.

“We have already made a deal with the Senate for a delay before your coronation, as it were,” Mon Mothma says. “They were under the impression it was because we needed time to extract you from the Yavin system without anyone noticing. You have two weeks before your first session.”

“We will use that time to train you in the finer arts of diplomacy and tactics,” Breha announces. “I have the best tutors in the Core transported here as we speak.”

Mon Mothma nods at Evaan. “And I will take you back to the Alliance when we return to Yavin. The faster we can train you, the better.”

“Can we still be in contact?” Leia blurts, and all of the adults look between them. Beside her, Evaan is blushing.

“No,” Bail Organa says, his tone final. “In order to portray an image of you as not part of the Rebel Alliance, you will not be in contact with them.”

“But you want me to smuggle information,” Leia says.

“There will be many intermediaries between you,” her mother assures. “Nothing will trace back to you. We can’t afford it. So say your goodbyes. Mon Mothma leaves with Evaan in an hour, and you start intensive training tomorrow.”

Leia takes Evaan’s hand and leads them out of the meeting room.

“Where are we going?” Evaan asks.

“The lounge. We have one hour.”

*

Leia’s eighteenth birthday is celebrated with all due deference, or so she’s told. As the clock alerts her that she is a legal adult and is a full-fledged member of the Imperial Senate and the legal heir to the throne of Organa, her spacecraft rattles through the air.

“What’s happening now, Bey?” Leia screams to her pilot, strapping herself into the copilot’s seat.

Shara Bey grips the console as the craft shudders again. “Pirates,” she says.

“Do they have a callsign?” Leia asks. Her crash course in piloting only taught her the basics of flight and the console, but she knows enough to scan for nearby ships. “Actually, don’t worry about it; I’m on it.”

As she tightens her seatbelt, Shara stands up and places one foot with a steel-tipped combat boot on the dashboard in front of Leia, holding onto the ceiling bar and punching in numbers.

Leia identifies the pirate ship after them. “The latest warrant out for their annihilation is from Hosnian Beta,” she says. “Treasure seekers.”

“Do we have any treasure on board?” Shara shouts at her over the crack and strain of the hull. The ship goes into full tailspin as another blast hits it, and red lights blink rapidly. Leia slams into her headrest at several G’s, and she groans. Shara, however, manages to remain standing in her precarious position, and pulls up the sonar tracking, moving the joystick and screaming into the crackling comm on her shoulder.

“Delta Five, this is Delta One, do you copy? We have a hostile incoming at our six; they’re almost through our shields--do you copy? Delta Four, Delta Two, come in!”

Leia looks at Shara Bey in her orange fatigues, her comm still fizzing, unanswered, and her long hair flowing wild. Her foot is still on the console in front of her, and Leia’s tongue is dry in her mouth. She doesn’t know what to do in this situation; she was never briefed for pirates. But Shara was.

Shara turns to Leia, her face wild and striking in the profile of deep space. “Do we have treasure onboard?” she repeats.

Leia considers. “No,” she says. “We dropped off the heirlooms at our last refuel. What are they tracking?”

“But do we have secrets? Information? Anything valuable that could be exchanged for money?” Shara isn’t looking at her anymore, but half-hanging from the ceiling as she jerks the ship out of the tailspin and diverts the power from the lights into the shield.

On screen, the shield is holding at seven percent.

“Always,” Leia responds, “but it’s in my head. If they want it, they wouldn’t blow us up.” Shara Bey, Lieutenant of Coruscanti forces and moonlighter for the Rebel Alliance, should know this. She’s transporting the Princess-Senator across the galaxy for less-than-legal reasons, and she should have been briefed.

As another crash rockets the ship, Leia knows that Shara’s oversight doesn’t matter. All that matters is getting out of this mess before they both end up dead.

“Peace,” a voice whispers in her ear. It sounds like her father, if Bail Organa was twenty years older and fond of carcinogens. “Your light does not end here.”

Leia whirls around, but the small craft is empty except for her and Shara. She could have sworn on her grandmother’s grave that she heard something.

Shara is still trying the comms as she weaves in and out of a path, bolts of energy whistling past and rattling the hull. “Delta Two! Command! Command, do you copy? This is Delta One, requesting immediate backup! We just breached the Core Sector, pursued by hostiles. Respond immediately.”

Leia closes her eyes. She knew she heard a voice…

The last time she heard a voice in her head it belonged to Evaan Verlaine, but it was just an echo of an earlier conversation, whispered through an encrypted line strung between planets. At the time, she knew Evaan wasn’t there, but just then, the croaking voice sounded right behind her shoulder.

Shara drops the comm unit on the floor, where it bounces against the side of the wall as she jerks the craft to the left and falls to the floor in several pieces.

Shara sneers, “Damn thing wasn’t working anyway.”

Leia is quiet. They both know the more likely situation is that all the other Delta crafts are destroyed and Command doesn’t have access to an encrypted line to pick up at this moment. They are on their own.

She will let Shara Bey have the fantasy, though, as long as the famous pirate of the Rebel Alliance guides them out of the situation with their lives and limbs intact.

She closes her eyes and folds her hands, the picture of a graceful princess. Her last secretary had told her that, while prostrating herself on the floor in Ryotu style. The half-Alderaanian had done nothing but given Leia compliments and follow her around until Leia hired someone else with less of a hero complex and an inside position in the Alliance. Shame she couldn’t hire Evaan, though, but the last time they talked--two weeks ago--Evaan talked vaguely of being on a strike team targeting some military mercenary leader that she couldn’t divulge even while encrypted, and told her she wouldn’t be available for contact for an indeterminate time.

So Leia is going to die, and her--her best friend, her unlikely partner--won’t know until she herself survives a long and harrowing mission.

“You are not going to die here,” the voice says again in her ear.

Leia doesn’t bother looking or moving. Hallucinations are the lowlight of her life. Besides the fact that she can’t mention them to anyone lest she be declared unfit for service in the Senate and the Alderaan throne, they sometimes plague her thoughts and distract her from reality.

And the only comm is broken on the floor, so there’s no way to tell her parents goodbye, or give her regards to Evaan, or spill secrets on several Senators in her dying breaths. She has to die in silence.

Shara says, “I think we’re almost out of range--” and the ship gives one final jerk before straightening out.

Leia opens her eyes. Before them is empty space, stars spread out across the map, no bolts of energy racing behind them, no pirates in sight.

“What happened?” Leia croaks.

The console navigator blinks as if they’ve received a message, something that, while operational in theory, Leia has never seen being used due to the existence of comms that are faster and more reliable. She looks at the broken comm on the floor.

Shara checks it and a grin blossoms on her grimy face. Immediately, ten years of stress fade from her face. She sits down in the pilot seat and takes a large breath. “It’s for you, Princess.”

Leia looks at the message. In the four lines allotted per message, it reads: You’re glad I’m here, right? Happy birthday xoxo EV

Leia pulls up the sonar graph and sees one tiny Y-wing flying behind them, displacing itself on the graph as if doing celebratory loops that she’s been told happen all the time on Rebel missions. “Evaan,” she sighs.

“Thank the Force for Evaan,” Shara Bey says, relaxing in her pilot’s chair and wiping a layer of sweat from her brow. “Without her, we’d be a wreck in the sky.” They don’t mention the other crafts that are probably debris floating in space.

Leia sends back: Are you our escort now? LO

Affirmative, is sent back almost immediately. The Y-wing is still doing loops.

See you on the ground. LO, Leia types back and waits, a smile on her face. When she lands, she can ask Evaan everything about her mission and why she was able to save them in the nick of time.

Now, Leia just sits and breathes.

*

She meets with a parent for the first time in months on a sunny evening in an outdoor cafe on Coruscant, watching the air taxis whistle through the polluted air.

While Leia is waiting for the person she thought would be meeting, she attends to the hours of matters that have piled up in her absence. The Senate meeting she is missing is voting on the tax supplements to the Outer Rim, and while Leia has never had the hands-on experience in the realm of taxation, as she is only a few months away from turning twenty, the Rebel Alliance has been setting up outposts in the more barren planets and she would have cast her vote against extra taxation.

Leia flips through her memos, and smiles fondly at a quick message from Evaan Verlaine--a completely unprofessional shot of her posing in front of her new shiny X-wing, with the caption: I’m a Lieutenant now!

Evaan, like Leia, is nearing her twentieth birthday and inexplicably is still into Leia, still deigns to send encoded messages about nothing in particular, and when the opportunity presents itself talks on an encrypted line. The last time Leia heard Evaan’s voice was after the second band of deep space pirates attacked a vessel with her in it, and the second time turned out like the first in that both she and her pilot escaped with their life. After that, General Ackbar instructed her to only travel legally with her diplomat license, and that the Alliance would continue to rely on their hundreds and thousands of couriers to smuggle information.

Travelling in first-class vehicles with minibars and high-speed connections to the ethers of the galaxy was tiring after endless months of interacting with no one but pilot droids who all report to the Empire, unable to hear her best and only friend’s voice.

Leia is an Organa, a Princess of the greatest planet in the Core, and a Senator for the Galactic Republic. She could deal with being away from her beau for--well, Leia had never actually seen Evaan in person after meeting her for the first time.

Someone sits down across her at the outdoor table, and Leia looks up from her holopad. Her father sits, cloaked in headgear following the current fashion of Naboo, disguising his prominent Organa nose and the wrinkles around his eyes. He smiles warmly.

“Father,” Leia smiles. “This is a surprise. I was under the impression a delegate of Hoth would be meeting me to discuss trade--” She waves her hand. “No matter. What do you want?”

“Do I have to have an excuse to come see my daughter? We work in the same hall and yet we haven’t said a word since last New Years’ Festival. How are you?” Bail Organa, ever the polite socializer and the delightful charmer to match Breha Organa’s knowledge and wit, smiles and waits for Leia’s answer.

“I’m fine.”

“How is the family business?” he grins.

He either means Alderaan or the Alliance, but both are doing similarly. “Perfectly on schedule,” Leia says. “I was just reviewing the schematics of the new public works projects now.”

Under the table, she closes the tab of Evaan’s message.

Bail Organa flags down a waiter, and a C770 unit strides to their table, with a smile as greasy as a Hutt, and says, “How may I take your order?”

“Caff, two,” Bail instructs, handing the droid credits and waving him off. “I’m glad you decided to take a larger part in your heritage and focus on the family, but I wasn’t referring to that business.”

Leia glances around on autopilot when Bail mentions that. Every faceless being could be a spy for the Empire, sent to tail her taking a personal afternoon. The droid returning with a pot of caff and two cracked shot glasses could be recording for a General or a Moff or some intern paid minimum wage to listen in on her conversations.

“I’m meeting with a scout in the Dagobah area to discuss land opportunities in a week,” Leia says, pulling up her actual schedule this time. On her feed, another message comes in from Evaan, and it takes every fiber of the young and carefree part of her being to ignore it.

“Cancel it,” Bail says.

For a moment, Leia is worried that he saw the message from the ID labelled Lieutenant Verlaine, but it’s been almost four years since Bail--and Leia, for that matter--last saw Evaan in person.

“You mean the meeting.”

“Of course I mean the meeting.” Bail leans in, and Leia can see the handcrafted sewing on his headgear in stark detail. She takes a sip of caff. “There’s another assignment for you. Remember when you retrieved the information from the Imperial database?”

Leia did remember a certain evening spent wooing a security guard and stealing all the files stored in the cloud a month ago. “Who did you find?”

“The one man who is fit to be a figurehead for the fight. He used to be a Jedi Master.”

Leia frowns, at both the taste of the instant caff and the notion that anyone was a Jedi. “You know the Jedi were myths created by the Empire to inspire fear.”

Bail shrugs. “I know that I never met a Jedi, but my generation grew up listening to bedtime stories about the Force and the order of the universe. And this Jedi Master is real.”

Leia says, “Please tell me he’s not in the Dagobah system.”

“Good lords, no, Dagobah has been deserted for half a century. He’s on Tatooine.”

Leia remembers her planetary history lessons. Tatooine, a slaver’s colony, heart of the Outer Rim and bordering on the Unknown Regions, all jungle life wiped out by a blight seven hundred years ago. Two suns orbiting constantly. The planet is pictured in her dreams. But her dreams are unimportant. “And why hasn’t the Empire killed him already?”

“They only predicted he fled to the Outer Rim. The Empire keeps their spies away from slavers’ ports to keep a good reputation, but as you know, we have no qualms.”

“We’re already hated by everyone,” Leia agrees, glancing around again at the inhabitants of the outdoor cafe, only two hundred stories above Ground. The entire cafe is a continuous balcony around a tube-shaped hotel building. None of the patrons even care about the plainly dressed businessperson and the tourist sitting together for an evening meal. “Are you sure this isn’t a trick by the Empire?”

“Why would the Empire set up a trick on a planet they do not want to be seen in? Press would be absolutely terrible. I want you to use your diplomatic immunity to waltz right in there under the guise of recruiting workers for the public works projects, gathering immigrants, and smuggle this Jedi back, too.”

“Will you take the meeting with the scout from Dagobah?” Leia raises her eyebrows. “I’m not a courier any longer, not after pirates constantly try to kill me. Why me?”

“I’ll take the meeting,” Bail says easily. “And you need to get out in the sun more. You’re so pale, Leia. I know you hardly leave your office after Senate hours. Vitamin D is good for the complexion and the spirit.”

Leia rolls her eyes. She can still do that; she’s a teenager for months yet. “I’ll do it, pops,” she smiles. “I’ll humor an old man’s wish.”

“I’ll tell your mother you said that,” gruffs Bail and slides a manila envelope out from under his cloak. Leia takes the nondescript package, shaped just as every other order from the Alliance. Bail stands and nods. “See you around, Leia.”

He catches an idling taxi directly from the edge of the cafe, and Leia is left sipping her caff. She opens the folder and takes enough of the file out to see the mugshot: a grimy candid of a cloaked man with white hair walking down the street next to an adobe dome, and the name: Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Leia sighs and opens the message from Evaan. Tonight, line 23Z3, Evaan writes. Private for 2 hours.

She has work to do.

*

Leia relaxes in yet another Coruscant hotel room, cordoned off from the Ground levels by at least three hundred stories--or so they advertised--and finally connects to the secure line with Evaan. She lies on the bed designed for all humanoid species, so it’s eight feet long and too fluffy for even a Princess.

She hears the confirmation code of the Rebel operator whispered into the line and then the dull thud as the line is manually connected, rerouted through light years of space and time, to lead her to Evaan. At least the operator didn’t gush how they’re Leia’s biggest fan this time.

Evaan picks up the call. “23Z3, confirm.”

“Evaan,” Leia smiles. Even as fuzzy as her--best friend’s--voice is, she can still hear all the old intonations she remembers clear as the ceiling, as Evaan answers expecting more work news and hears an expected surprise. “This is 23Z3, confirmed.”

Evaan sighs over the call, and Leia holds the old holo to her ear. It was created before someone got the great idea to use one interface for all communication, and is an analog piece of metal that’s four pounds too heavy and undetectable to Empire tracers. “Leia. I’m so glad it’s you and not the latest update from Mothma.”

“You call your boss ‘Mothma’ now?” Leia quirks an eyebrow.

“I call where whatever I want as long as I get the job done, which I do, ahead of schedule, every time. But this time, there’s more than an acceptable risk involved in what we’re doing here, and I can’t tell you anything--”

“The satellite plans, I know,” Leia assures her.

“Some unexpected variables just came into play, and none of my algorithms prepared me for this. I’m stuck at the office, but no one cares if I take a personal call.”

“I’m glad this is a personal call,” Leia says suddenly. “I’m really glad.”

“Hey, same back at you,” Evaan laughs, airing her audible stress out. “I’m just the person at the comms, monitoring the information passing through. I’m not the one checking in with the Rogue One every thirty minutes, just looking at the sonar waves. Trust me, Dameron is much more stressed. He’s having a nervous breakdown from--can you believe this--caff injections. It’s a new Yavin fad. He’s been up for--hey, Kes, when was the last time you slept?”

Someone shouts static onto the line, and Leia can stop grinning. She’s talking to Evaan, who is fine under the circumstances, enough to crack some jokes and relieve some stress, even though she’s running the most dangerous op in a lifetime.

Evaan returns to the phone. “It’s been four days,” she informs Leia with something akin to glee. “He’s been injecting adrenaline straight into his veins like a junkie, and is breathing into a bag now. He needs to get a better work ethic!” This last sentence was shouted across the room, presumably at Kes.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Evaan says again, in response to an unknown remark. “Just don’t ask how long I’ve been awake, yeah?”

“Okay,” Leia says. She wasn’t planning on heading in that direction of conversation, because if she did, she would have to confess her workaholic tendencies too. “Let’s talk about your birthday. The big two-oh.”

“Yours is coming soon, too. Before mine, so let’s plan it first. You’ll be legal in the other half of the galaxy, Leia. How do you feel about that?”

Leia smiles to herself. “Well, there’s not a lot of advantages to being legal in the rest of the systems,” she says. “If I’m caught for any illegal thing people suspect me of, I could be put to death in more galaxies than one, now. It’s nothing to celebrate.”

“But now you have something to sweeten your way to the gallows,” Evaan reminds her. “Alcohol.”

Leia props the holo next to her ear and begins to unwind her braids from a long productive day. Her long frizzy hair falls against her back, and her scalp relaxes for the first time in too long. “We’re both too good at our jobs to drink, now. Remember our times as cadets, Verlaine?”

Evaan is silent.

“Of course you do,” Leia groans, massaging her temples. “It wasn’t that long ago, but we were still completely different people. We would have gotten drunk to deal with the stresses of life then.”

“We did, remember the bar?” Evaan says. “Remember the rebellious cloister music, and your Princessly rage that I supported the Alliance?”

“We were completely different people,” Leia shrugs. “In some ways, though, I’m not glad we changed.”

“Would you have wanted to be a rebellious teenager forever, though? Because you didn’t handle it too well for the little time that you actually experienced it. Had your parents kept any of their dealing secret from you for longer, I think you may have spontaneously combusted.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have caff injections to keep me going,” Leia says. Even though she brought it up, she doesn’t like to talk about that time in her past. Too focused on her birth parents, long dead and unrecorded, and too cynical of the system of government in which she was raised.

She’s different now. Isn’t she?

“But enough about me,” Evaan says. “What’s new with you?”

Leia thinks of her mission assigned to her, and the manilla folder she’s read cover-to-cover. “I’m going to track down a Jedi.”

“A real Jedi? They exist?”

“According to my father,” Leia says, but no, that’s too dismissive. What about the hallucinations and the premonitions you’ve felt your entire life? “I think--they probably exist, yes.” But even if the Force exists, I can’t be a Jedi. There’s no way.

“And you’re going to find one.” Evaan shakes her head. “You know, Mothma and Ackbar and the other Admirals are all old enough to remember the Jedi Temple, if there was actually one that promised to ‘keep the peace’ and ‘mediate concerns’ and whatever other dictatorial demands Imperial rumors taught us they did. But no one ever mentions anything when the rumors are brought up--not that we talk about rumors here in the Alliance. We’re completely based on cold, hard fact here. But if they did exist, no one seems to think it’s important we know about them.”

“If they were real and they were wiped out,” Leia proposes, “it might be a bit of a sore spot in everyone’s mind, of how the Empire won and the Jedi Council--which no one actually knows operated like the Empire--was completely destroyed in the process.”

“I guess. But let’s not talk about people dead and gone and not dead enough that you can track them down. I can’t talk for much longer; I’m sorry I told you I had two hours--you know how the job goes.”

Leia doesn’t, but she can guess. “I understand.”

“When can we speak next?”

“I’ll be on Tatooine next week,” Leia says. “See if you can get some time off.” It’s been four years since she’s seen Evaan’s face in person, and by now she deserves to.

But, predictably, the tenor in Evaan’s voice drops. “I’m sorry, Leia,” she says. “There’s no time off this job. Eighteen hour shifts--unless we’re Kes and want to fuck our circadian rhythms up--and no time off until it’s done or we’re dead. But I can call you. Give me a buzz when you’re on your way.”

Leia smiles, her mouth stretched thin over her face. The gesture won’t be translated over the analog holo. “Of course,” she promises, projecting the voice she uses for Senate meetings and monarchical press conferences. The voice she uses with her mother. “Let us talk then.”

“See you in many moons,” Evaan promises, and the line clicks off.

“See you in many moons,” Leia repeats to no one but the operator, who gladly doesn’t respond to the disappointment in a girl not even legal in half the systems in orbit. The operator disconnects the wire, and the analog holo Leia is holding is nothing more than an old-fashioned paperweight.

She drops it on the hotel bed and stares at the ceiling. Princesses do not cry. Senators do not cry. Evaan is part of something much greater than herself, and however Leia likes to think she has a claim on her--because Verlaine is the only person she talks to, because they rescued each other at the most confusing time in their lives, because they slept together once--Evaan will always put that first.

Leia looks at the manilla folder on the desk, the contents scattered. Grainy security shots of the back of the head of an old man in monk robes make up the majority of the folder, but from them Leia can gather no concrete evidence that the Jedi are real, or that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a real person.

Leia Organa will put her work in front of her relationships and the best part of her life too, she supposes.

*

She falls asleep with the concrete static of Evaan’s voice in her head, the disappointment wavering in her words as she, yet again, can’t see Leia face to face. It couldn’t possibly be because she doesn’t want to see her, does it? There’s no way. Evaan initiates as many conversations with Leia as vice versa, and Leia is sure that there is not a power imbalance in their relationship, whatever their relationship actually is.

And she falls asleep with Evaan in her mind, and she imagines how Evaan looks right now, at this point in time. In her mind, Evaan is sitting at a desk with a clear screen charting all sonar and radio waves in the area, running on minimal power, with dots to represent the different vehicles and their call signs in Basic beside them. Evaan’s desk is otherwise sparse, with only a holopad, open and reading a feed of messages from the spacecraft labelled Rogue One, and several disposable cups with stains of caff rings around them stacked at the edge. The analog holo is tucked away in a drawer along with some other keepsakes, and Evaan keeps looking at it.

For a dream, the sight is oddly concrete in Leia’s mind.

The headquarters of the Alliance is mainly based in an underground bunker, as there are wires running from all screens to the wall and then up through the ceiling. Lighting is dim, and every so often a bare bulb flickers and the only other person in the room--a Yavinian man who has no caff cups on his desk but is shaking like a rabid bantha--gets up periodically to switch bulbs out. Even though Evaan and--Kes, it was--are the only ones in the bunker, the tension is palpable. Every time a red light blinks on the screen in front of Evaan, she charts it with her own shaking fingers and types out a response in her holo, knuckles squeezed together. She relays the information sharply to Kes.

Kes has one ear to an analog holo at all times, even when he paces and replaced light bulbs, and sometimes talks into it in short, quick breaths. He can’t be more than twenty-five, but half of his hair is grey and he stands in such a way that betrays his military background. Leia still stands rigid like she’s sixteen and in formation again, especially when she wants to impress members of the military, but this is no show. This is Kes Dameron’s coping mechanism, reverting to his earlier training.

While having a continuously open line with someone, humming in response at various intervals, he is typing on his own holo, and every so often drawing lines between points on his screen with his fingers, the screen picking up his fingers in bright red lines against the clear background. The dots on his screens are labelled TIE Fighter Squadrons S1 through S7, Red Guard Ships R1 through R12, all surrounded by what appears to be an energy field labelled the Death Star. The energy field looks to be about the size of a small planet.

Evaan stands and walks over to Kes’ desk, sitting down in the chair across from his screen and collapsing her head into it.

“Are you away from your station right now, Lieutenant?” Kes says mildly, not looking up from his work. He seems to have trouble typing into his holo.

“No,” Evaan says, muffled into her arms. “If the red light blinks, I’ll look at it. Until then… I just can’t.”

“You know, I didn’t mean to intrude, but I did hear your conversation with your mysterious girlfriend who is one hundred percent definitely the heir to the Alderaan throne. You can take time off if you wish.”

Evaan looks up at this. Leia is floating somewhere in the room, close enough to see every freckle on Evaan’s face, every black ring around her eyes, but far enough away that eshe can take in the entire environment of the dream. “No,” Evaan says firmly. The veins in her eyes are red and pronounced. “There’s no one who can do my job as quickly as I.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Kes says gently.

“There’s not!” Evaan protests. “You know the other contenders--Ron only applied to the Alliance as a stop on his way deep into the Unknown Regions; Amad sleeps on the job, and no one seems to care that we have the lives of three people, all traitors to the Empire, in our hands, and if we fuck it up, they’re dead. No exceptions.”

From Evaan’s desk, a red light flashes and Evaan swears in a language native to Alderaan, one of the many Leia has not had time to become familiar with.

Kes puts his arm on Evaan’s, and Leia bristles. How dare he be forward enough to touch her, when Evaan is--when she is--what is she to Leia? What is the difference between their actual relationship and Leia’s hopes for their relationship?

“I’ll take care of it,” Kes promises. “Just rest for a bit.”

Evaan nods, already drifting off into the welcome embrace of sleep on Kes’s desk. Leia looks at her for a bit; she’s never seen Evaan sleep since they were both children no matter what system in the galaxy they were in, has never seen her face stained with wrinkles and stress.

Kes walks over to Evaan’s desk and inspects the movement of the vessels being tracked, hums and frowns but without heat, and enters texts something in on the holo, then walks back to his desk.

Someone puts their hand on Leia’s arm and she whirls around. An man stands next to her, so familiar to the security shots she’s been examining for the past few hours, but not wearing old wool robes and looking a few decades younger.

“Leia Organa,” he says.

Leia blinks. “We haven’t met,” she says. “But let me take a guess. Obi-Wan Kenobi?”

The man inclines his head. So he knows Alderaan customs.

“And you’re in this dream with me,” Leia sighs. “I’m going to take a guess and say that the Force is real and all the rumors I’ve heard about you are true.”

“Well, I don’t know what you heard, but I assure you, when I looked like this, I was quite the activist.” He smiles like a politician. Leia likes him already.

“Why are you here? And why am I dreaming of Evaan’s life?” she asks.

“I’m here because you blatantly called me across the cosmos,” Kenobi says. “You have utilized the Force multiple times in your life, most notably when you were discovering who I was. So, here I am.”

Leia’s gut sinks. “The Force isn’t--I can’t be--there’s no way.”

Kenobi waits for Leia to say what she so clearly wants to, passively waiting, just like a teacher.

“You don’t understand,” Leia hisses. “The Empire has tested everyone for Force sensitivity. I mean, that’s not what they called it--the Force, legally, doesn’t exist--but they have everyone’s blood. I don’t have the Force.”

Kenobi huffs a laugh. Somewhere inside Leia, she knows he looks familiar, like she’s seen him before, but she knows she hasn’t. “You know, the popular opinion was that the Force existed in the bloodstream, that particles called midichlorians dictated the sensitivity people had to the greatest karma in the universe. Those theorists were wrong, but the theory was popular enough that the Empire and their former Jedi leader thinks that’s how the Force is transferred--through genetic lines, these particles in your bloodstream opening up your connection with the past and the future. Force sensitivity evades explanation, and so even if you have been tested for Force sensitivity every year for the past twenty, and have a midichlorian count of zero, the Force is definitely still present in you. Can’t you feel it?”

“You don’t understand,” Leia says again. “If I have the Force, then I am public enemy number one. Regardless of whether the Empire can prove I have connections to the most problematic terrorist group they’ve ever contended with, if I am Force sensitive then I can’t do anything to fulfill my roles in life. I can’t be an Organa, I can’t be a Senator, I can’t be a courier for the Alliance. I have to be a hermit. I am not Force sensitive.”

“The reason I am here,” Kenobi interrupts, “is not to reveal your connection to the Force. I am here to tell you that there are two different ways the future will happen in the next week. In two days, you will receive the plans to the Death Star’s new weapon. You will immediately be sent to find me and give them to me.”

“But I don’t need to do that now because you know?” Leia asks.

“You must find me,” Kenobi says. “Just like you won’t remember this when you wake, not in the detail you are experiencing now, neither will I. You must find me either way. But your father will want you to use your diplomatic immunity and travel in your official ship to Tatooine under the guise of normality. If you do this, frankly, everything will go to shit. The other option is to send the spaceship ahead of you with an aide in your place, and call up your pilot girlfriend to go the opposite direction to Tatooine, the plans in tow on your ship. This way, you have at least a chance to succeed.”

“I have to call Evaan and ask her to pilot me to Tatooine,” Leia repeats. She looks at where Evaan is still asleep of Kes’ desk. “And she will accept?”

“I don’t know,” Kenobi says. “But it is imperative that you try.”

“How do you know that this will be the better option? How does the Force tell you this?”

Kenobi sighs. “I was never a good teacher,” he says. “But something changed for you from the expected timeline. You didn’t have this option before, and your only choice was to fly right into the midst of danger. But now, somehow, the universe has given you a way out. Please, please take it.”

Leia looks at Evaan, who has begun to drool on her arm. To see her in person, once Leia wakes, so she can fully remember this moment… “I’ll do it,” Leia decides. “I’ll contact Evaan. Don’t worry about it, Kenobi.”

When she turns back, the man next to her has disappeared. In the dream, Kes opens his desk drawer and takes out a syringe of blue liquid, flicking the tip until it comes out. He positions it over his arm vein and pushes it in, exactly like a junkie, and closes his eyes until his arms stop spasming wildly and takes it out, tossing it in a bin.

He takes a deep breath, looking around the bunker, almost like he can see Leia--but of course he can’t. She’s only here in the dream, only because of the Force.

The red light on Evaan’s desk beeps again, and Kes hurries over to it.

Leia closes her eyes and the scene fades.

*

She is in the middle of paperwork, her hands cramping from manually signing thousands of identical documents allowing refugees into Alderaan’s borders from the civil wars in the Outer Rim. Breha Organa had relegated all signing duties to her daughter to prepare her for the hard work of being a monarch full time once she retired, and Leia resolutely keeps signing her name, Princess Leia Organa, on every document on the dotted line. It’s been hours. She keeps signing.

There’s a knock on her office door, and Leia zooms out of her stupor. “Come in,” she says, voice hoarse. What time is it? How long has it been since she started her paperwork, moments after the Senate hearing let out? Outside, Coruscant is dark except for the sterile electric lights radiating from every apartment this side of the planet.

The door clicks open, and Bail Organa walks in, a spring in his step. In his hands, he holds a sheaf of papers, hot off the press so much that his hands are stained with ink. He slams the door shut behind him, and Leia winces. “We got it,” he grins.

Leia sits up straighter. “The plans?” she says. “For the weapon?”

Bail gives them to her, and Leia looks through the copied blueprints, instruction manuals, and pictures of the skeletal structure in the shape of a satellite. “I have to move now,” she realizes.

“Your ship is waiting for you,” Bail says. “Docking Bay C. We’ve outfitted it with the best pilots and guards you could possibly ask for, none of the Alliance rejects you had on those ships chased by pirates. Nothing will stop your journey now.”

Leia nods, but pauses. Something scratches the back of her mind, the voice of someone she’s never heard before, saying: Remember Evaan.

Of course she’s remembering Evaan. Evaan, who isn’t able to visit her on Tatooine because she can’t take leave in her super important job that probably consists of extracting the spies who gathered this information.

But: there’s something more in Leia’s mind, something behind the surface, scratching a spot Leia hasn’t paid attention to. She always forgets her dreams, every single time, and even though she woke up after the bedtime call with Evaan, sweating and screaming soundlessly, sure she needed to do something--there is a gap in her brain when she dreamed, but she needs to remember it.

Leia looks at the plans for the new Imperial weapon, leafing through the pages and looking at the capabilities for the weapon: a planet, destroyed, in the space of one minute. Billions of people screaming soundlessly into the abyss of space. She needs to get to Kenobi now.

Since when has Leia started thinking of the old man on the security footage as Kenobi? And since when has she seen him in her mind, not as an old man with history gone by without him, but as a young man, serious and patient and not a very good teacher?

Bail Organa is repeating her name. Leia meets his eyes. “Right,” she says, all business, flexing her cramping hand. “Docking Bay C. My ride awaits.”

“I packed your luggage,” Bail says, handing her a small duffel. Leia slings it over her shoulder, and reaches over the back of her chair to sling a jacket over her shoulders. Even though the jacket has her ceremonial military awards on it from being a Senator and a Princess, displaying her status to the world, it makes her feel less formal and more like one of the masses, wearing a jacket to protect from the freezing recycled air in any ship.

“Thanks, Dad,” she says, and Bail pulls her in for a hug. Leia lets him, and hugs back like she might never see him again--but that thought is preposterous, like every other premonition appearing suddenly in her mind and disappearing just as soon after. This is a diplomatic recon mission, nothing to be afraid of.

Bail sends her down the hall, and Leia looks at the Senate quarters for the first time in months. Striking shades of grey and black line the hallways, and the signs are in Basic and Coruscanti, directing her to the docking bays. The only people she sees in the hallways are aides, dressed in formal wear from their cultures, ranks and name tags pinned to their uniforms. They don’t look her in the face, instead glued to their holos, tapping messages and conversing with others through earpieces.

Leia stops and looks at one aide, a Nabooian handmaiden to the Lord Regent with ceremonial makeup dripping off in the summer heat, lip paint smudged. She wears heavy furs that drag behind her on the floor, and even after the ordeal of getting dressed up for the Senate hearing, she carries herself with pride and purpose.

But the earpiece. Leia can’t stop looking at the holo attached to the aide’s ear, and she can almost hear the conversation happening, even from several feet away. Communication is important, she knows. Holos are necessary, but…

Leia enters the elevator for Docking Bay C, and chews on her lip. Holos, she thinks. There was something important she’s supposed to know about holos. She looks at the plans in her hand and the duffel slung around her shoulder.

She enters the docking bay and looks at the diplomatic ship being prepared to board. Droids roll into the ship, bickering amongst themselves, and crew members check the final procedures before taking off.

It comes to her in a flash. Evaan. She’s supposed to communicate with Evaan, because she’s not supposed to be on this ship. She was told.

She was told by…

It’s unimportant now, Leia knows. The name will come to her eventually. She stalks over to the nearest member of the docking crew wearing red fatigues and gives them the necessary instructions: she’s not entering this ship, but she will pay them double his current pay to log her in regardless.

The docking crew member, having been oppressed by capitalism their entire life, accepts immediately, and Leia hands over the credits in exchange for their personal analog holo.

She dials Evaan’s number, and the operator puts her through immediately.

From the other end of the line comes Kes Dameron’s tired voice. “Two-three-z-three,” he states. “Confirm.”

“23Z3, confirmed,” she repeats. “Lieutenant Dameron, this is Leia Organa.”

She can almost hear his sly grin. “Glad to meet you, Princess,” he says. “I have your girlfriend here, if you want to talk.”

From off the line, Evaan says in a tinny voice, “Don’t call her that, Kes! You know that’s not true. Give me the line. Give it to me!”

“I do want to talk,” Leia says. She’s glad both of them are less stressed than--when were they stressed? How did Leia know that Evaan was so tired she fell asleep on Kes’ desk and he allowed it? “Immediately, please.”

“As you wish, Princess,” Kes says, and Evaan is put on the line.

“Calling me as you board?” Evaan confirms.

Right. Leia was supposed to call her to chat meaninglessly, ignoring the fact that they weren’t able to meet up as they touched down. “Look,” she says. “This is Priority One. I have an accurate source that tells me that my ship is going to be followed and caught. I need secondary transportation, and fast. Evaan Verlaine, I know you don’t want to leave your post, but you’re my only hope.”

There is silence on the line.

“You’re sure of this source?” Evaan asks.

Leia thinks of the face of a man who is decades older in photos, telling her the most guarded parts about herself directly to her face. “I am absolutely sure.”

Evaan sighs. “I have Shara’s Y-wing that she won’t miss for a day.”

From off the line, Kes says, “Hey, are you talking about Shara?”

Evaan continues, “I can be there in… two hours, if I leave now.”

“Yes, please leave already,” Kes shouts. “One of us has to have good sleeping habits if Cassian’s going to survive.”

“Please,” Leia says desperately. “I mean it, Evaan. We’re not going to get this information to you-know-who if I take my official shuttle. I don’t know if I would die, but… I can’t risk it. You know I can’t.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” Evaan assures. “Leia. I know we’ve never really talked about us since that night--” that night being the one where they, experiencing real life for the first time at sixteen, slept together and conveniently forgot to mention it at any other point since then, “--but you’ve heard Kes call you my girlfriend. I didn’t tell him to call you that, if you think that--but I care about you, more than anything. I will definitely leave my post to fly to you and save your life.”

Leia is grinning. There might be tears rolling down her cheeks, but it’s been a long day, and no one that cares is around to see. “You know, I’m not opposed to the label,” she says. “Not if you want it, too.”

“I do want it,” Evaan says hurriedly. “It’s not the best time to talk. I know. In person when I arrive on Coruscant, yeah?”

“Docking Bay C,” Leia says. “Please be there as soon as possible.”

“See you later, girlfriend,” Evaan says, and hangs up. Leia gives the analog holo back to the docking personnel with a large grin on her face.

“You’re logged as on that ship, Princess,” they tell her. “Do you want to take off now?”

“Please,” Leia instructs, and untangles her hair buns in the bathroom and zips up the jacket. She sits on a bench on the docking bay lounge as her official diplomatic ship takes off, and she sits surrounded by civilians who don’t give her a second glance.

Leia sits, looking at the stars in the galaxy sky, waiting for Evaan to arrive, waiting for the start of the rest of her life.

 

 

 

fin.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to take a look at the post on my tumblr, [here it is](http://bi-dianaprince.tumblr.com/post/153666125782).


End file.
